How Can I Get my Audience to Interact More with my Content?

Brynna Baldauf discusses: “How Can I Get my Audience to Interact More with my Content?”

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Transcription

My name is Brynna Baldauf, and today’s question is: How can I get my audience to interact more with my content?

The first step is analyzing your content. So, have you defined your target market? Do you really know who you’re creating content for? It’s hard to create content for an audience that you don’t really understand. If you don’t understand their needs and values, how are you going to keep them interested?

The second thing is that you need to research what your target market is interested in. Do you understand what they like to do outside of your company? If you’re only talking about your company over and over again, that message is going to become very boring to them, and eventually you’re going to lose readership and interest.

The third thing that you need to look at is: What do they already know about your company? If they are on a beginner level, you need to be writing content to interact with those people versus a more advanced level, where you need to be including more facts and figures, perhaps less pictures and longer content. So, having a span of content that kind of goes from beginner to the advanced range will definitely help more people stay engaged with your content over a span of time, as they can grow with you.

So, what are your goals for sharing the content? Are you trying to accomplish more engagement, or are you trying to accomplish a wider audience? If you set down goals by looking at your analytics, you can more easily figure out what your audience needs. Looking at your metrics and being able to problem-solve will help you to get a clear engagement from your audience, because having multiple messages in one piece of content can ultimately confuse people and lower your engagement.

The next thing you need to look at is: Have you tried this message before and has it been successful? If you’ve tried to offer people discounts or free sales, has that worked in the past? If yes, you need to look at why it has or why it hasn’t. If not, what’s a way that you can kind of change your message and ultimately get more engagement out of your audience?

The last thing is: How are you sharing your content? Are you doing just a blog post and just leaving it there and hoping that people come and find it through the RSS? Or are you also pushing it through your social media, social bookmarking, having your own employees tweet it out, Facebook it out, etc.? If you find ways that people can find your content, they’re more likely to engage with it and share it, ultimately making more people interact with it.

When it comes down to your actual content, there are a few things that you need to remember. Is your content easy to access? If people have to log in to a website or join something or sign up with their email, they’re much less likely to actually engage with your content, because it’s harder for them to get through. If you have barriers, it’s going to be more difficult for people to engage with your content.

The second thing is; Is it an appropriate level of understanding? If you have a beginner knowledge, then people are going to be a little more likely to share it, versus if you have an advanced knowledge set, then you kind of have to cater to that audience. You need to work within what your niche is and what your target audience understands.

For example, if you’re doing a top ten, that’s very much a beginner knowledge base, and not many advanced users are going to pick that up. But if you’re doing something like an in-depth white paper, then you’re going to bet that more industry level people are going to share that and engage with that. So it really depends on what kind of content you’re putting out there.

The last thing is: Is your content easy to interact with? Can people find it? Is your content shareable? Do you have share buttons out there? Do you have the Twitter, social media, Google+, etc.? Do you have an embed code, or underneath the content do you encourage people to share it? It might sound silly, but actually encouraging people to share the content can go a long way.

To sum it up, you want to make sure that you understand who your target audience is and what their needs are. You need to make sure that you understand their knowledge base, and you kind of cater to that with your content. If you understand what your audience wants, you can more easily have them engage with your content and share it.

Last, but not least, make sure that it is accessible to them. Have those share buttons on there so that they can easily get to it and share it with all their friends and ultimately have more engagement. Thanks. It’s been fun.

About Brynna Baldauf

1 Comment

Nick StamoulisOct 11, 2012

To add to what Brynna mentioned about barriers, once your followers get to your content, you need to create opportunities for them to convert. Your social profiles should all have direct links back to your website. If someone comes across your content and is interested in learning more about your company, you need to make your website no more than 2 clicks away to keep them engaged with your business.